and, after an interruption
in our intercourse of about five years, spent the evening with my old
friend. And for years after we were inseparable companions, who, when
living in the same neighbourhood, spent together almost every hour not
given to private study or inevitable occupation, and who, when separated
by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volumes. We had parted
boys, and had now grown men; and for the first few weeks we took stock
of each other's acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each
other's calibre, with some little curiosity. The mind of my friend had
developed rather in a scientific than literary direction. He afterwards
carried away the first mathematical prize of his year at college, and
the second in natural philosophy; and he had, I now found, great
acuteness as a metaphysician, and no inconsiderable acquaintance with
the antagonistic positions of the schools of Hume and Reid. On the other
hand, my opportunities of observation had been perhaps greater than his,
and my acquaintance with men, and even with books, more extensive; and
in the interchange of idea which we carried on, both were gainers: he
occasionally picked up in our conversations a fact of which he had been
previously ignorant; and I, mayhap, learned to look more closely than
before at an argument. I introduced him to the Eathie Lias, and assisted
him in forming a small collection, which, ere he ultimately dissipated
it, contained some curious fossils--among the others, the second
specimen of _Pterichthys_ ever found; and he, in turn, was able to give
me a few geological notions, which, though quite crude enough--for
natural science was not taught at the university which he attended--I
found of use in the arrangement of my facts--now become considerable
enough to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large
accumulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was
one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter
improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which
for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me,
that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had
flourished and decayed--a world greatly older than that before the
Flood--had been tenanted by rational, responsible beings, for whom, as
for the race to which we ourselves belong, a resurrection and a day of
final judgment had awaited. But many thousands of